The Invisible Man, IT and Shazam! composer, Benjamin Wallfisch, has recently unveiled The Scoring Lab, his new composition facility based in the heart of Santa Monica, California. Wallfisch has pushed the boundaries with the space which has enabled him to explore the creative compositional and mixing processes to their fullest potential.
The studio has recently been nominated for the Creative Achievement in Studio Design in the 36th NAAM TEC Awards and takes full advantage of a classic bow-truss warehouse space, which used to be an art gallery.
Explore the studio and read how Benjamin approached the project below.
There’s such immense new creative potential when mixing music in Atmos and we are excited to be able to offer the scoring community a place to experiment with this new format.
Words by Benjamin Wallfisch
All credit goes to my good friend and genius architect, Peter Grueneisen, for bringing my crazy ideas for a new kind of writing and mix studio to life.
His team at nonzero\architecture and also the entire GreenIron construction crew did an incredible job. Kudos also to Bill Learned and Frank Verschuuren at Vintage King, Michael R. Miller, Alfredo Pasquel and Kaitlyn Delle Donne for being such great technical partners.
Our in-house Dolby Atmos mixing studio, The Mix Lab, has been set up as an independent business founded by myself and my wife Missy and headed up by a true legend in our community, Vicki Giordano. There’s such immense new creative potential when mixing music in Atmos and we are excited to be able to offer the scoring community a place to experiment with this new format, alongside more traditional 5.1 and 7.1 mixing.
Our thanks also goes to ATC Loudspeakers who are based in the UK. In our original plans for The Mix Lab, we had sixteen SCM-45 speakers hanging from the ceiling and walls, but the City of Santa Monica wouldn’t give us planning permission as it would create over a metric ton of downward force on the room’s framing. We approached the design team at ATC with the issue and they custom built us passive SCM-45s, separating the heavy three-way amplifiers from the speakers so we could relocate the amps up in the machine room - it was great to work with them to solve that particular conundrum.
In our original plans for The Mix Lab, we had sixteen SCM-45 speakers hanging from the ceiling and walls, but the City of Santa Monica wouldn’t give us planning permission as it would create over a metric ton of downward force on the room’s framing.
